#(( why i have started to really hate monprom

[royalreef]

@lambfated​ inquired: What would cause you to leave a fandom? Munday Salt - Accepting

(( Glances over at the Monster Prom fandom.

Ha ha ha. Hah.

So the first thing you should know about me is that I don’t seem to participate in fandoms in the same way as everyone else. I don’t fandom hop. In my experience, and from my experience of watching everyone else cycle through ten different fandoms a minute, it’s pretty uncommon to find people who don’t fandom hop. Sure, I’ll get into other things and even reblog fanart and read fanfictions of them, but I don’t consider myself as being in the fandom in the same way, because I don’t participate the same way. I probably don’t have all that many opinions as to what’s going on as other people. I won’t really talk about it.

Instead, as evidenced by this blog, I will find a fandom and I will stay there. For years at a time. I will remain there, remain making fanart and writing for it and speculating on things and hashing ideas out, things that I do now for Miranda, and I simply won’t leave long after everyone else has already left and I will stay there day in and day out at the same level. I don’t really chase trends, I don’t really get into new stuff, I will find a singular fandom and camp there.

This is how it’s been for Monster Prom and me. I got in right when the game released, and I remained here. DLC has come and gone, a Kickstarter has come and gone, sequels have come and gone, and I haven’t really left.

For my previous fandom, Homestuck, I think I was there for something like 8 years. It was the same way.

So when I talk about leaving fandoms, I mean this in a much different way that most people mean it. If it’s a casual interest of mine, I’ll just stop interacting with it, and won’t consider that leaving the fandom because I was never in it. If it’s the fandom where I’ve camped out in, it’s a much longer, more painful process.

I guess I couldn’t really tell you when it really started? Like, the writing issues first started cropping up in the Second Term DLC, but they felt minor enough at the time where I didn’t worry about them then, and worrying about them now likewise feels odd. I’ve talked a lot before about my disappointment with Zoe, but her and Calculester both feel fundamentally different from the original ROs to me and it’s hard to decipher why. Maybe it’s just because they were created and added later, so they inherently missed out on working all of the ROs in together and figuring out how they riffed off of each other, so they’re inherently far less connected to each other than the other ROs were? The Kale ending was an utter nightmare for multiple reasons, but I was willing to write that off, especially since apparently there are people that exist that love it.

I know there were also issues with the Kickstarter too, but these also felt minor at the time. I’m less bothered by the limited Kickstarter merch than by the rest of the limited merch that would be released, mostly because it feels much more natural to me for Kickstarters to have limited edition merch. I’ve pledged to a lot of Kickstarters, that seems fairly common to me. I don’t like the limited releases of other items in comparison, because they do have proper merch stores for Monster Prom that haven’t been updated since Second Term, and it always feels like they’re preying a lot more on FOMO.

Monster Camp also had..... a lot of writing issues for me. The first and easiest one to get out of the way is just the scatological humor. It feels like the original Monster Prom had WAY less scatological humor going on, and the ability to remove scenes with it never worked in my games. For the record, that kind of topic for me is legitimately a trigger, one that I don’t like discussing both because of how severe it is, but also how much no one takes it seriously. I don’t like that there are parts of this game that are suddenly inaccessible to me when they didn’t used to be, and I don’t like that entire “secrets” are also excluded from me due to something that never was an issue before. I also fundamentally hate the Drinks mechanic. Yes, I know there are different modes for it, but the fact that you have to unlock the drinks too is just frustrating more than anything. Either my choice is to miss out on a lot of secret endings due to RNG, or to try and use a system that I can’t because I have trouble with hand-eye-coordination and moving my hands in the first place. It also doesn’t help that it’s not optional, unlike the Shop that it replaces, so you end up forced back to it time and time again and you don’t even get the chance to avoid it.

But the characters themselves also began to feel... off, to me? I don’t think it was as bad as I was dreading, but it still didn’t feel right. Dynamics felt jilted, characters didn’t seem to quite have the same force of personality they had before, there was a ton of loss of “voice” for individual characters. I think them not having the same voice as before is one of the big issues — when I look at a list of quotes from the first game, it’s VERY easy to figure out which character said them just from phrasing and word choice and inflection. When I look at a list of quotes from the second game, I can’t, because these characters all start to sound the same and say the same things and come off in the same way. It’s where I feel like the ability to let Kickstarter backers choose the ROs really failed the hardest, because that meant there wasn’t a diversity of dynamics and different internal voices for these characters for them to stand out against each other, but I also feel like the writing itself lost the ability to distinguish between characters.

And then... Roadtrip. Oh, oh Roadtrip.

Mechanically, I actually kind of love this game? It feels like it has a nice, snappy balance, in a way that Monster Camp didn’t have, and it doesn’t make me utterly hate my life to play. There was still an issue with the scatological humor — this time it doesn’t even remove the options from your game or give you something alternative, but just adds a ticker that an option will contain it. It still locks “secrets” behind those triggers, and it can also really fuck with my stats if a stat I need is connected to an option with that trigger. But it’s not as big of an issue as Monster Camp where it didn’t work at all, so, you know.

But Roadtrip’s writing is... atrocious. The characters feel flanderized in a frankly awful manner, like the devs were just looking at the fandom’s notes for how the characters behaved and worked and entirely threw away everything that they had before. I’ve always hated the fanon, but now fanon is canon and it loses so much of what I actually liked about these games and what drew me to them. These characters don’t feel like friends anymore. They almost feel like they all hate each other and are forced to tolerate each other because they want to fit into the idea of a friend group, they stop feeling like individual people to me, they’ve had all their hard edges sawed off and sanded down until they could be as palatable as possible to as many people as possible, it’s just awful all-around. I hate Scott being given the Papyrus treatment and Polly treating him cussing as out of character for him. The expanded lore for the PCs feels out of place and not like Monster Prom characters, as if they belong to some other game. The way they handle Miranda’s eating disorder is downright offensive and made my own flare up. It’s bad. I won’t lie.

And I think that ties back into why I tend to have to leave these big fandoms for me that I camp out in for years at a time.

The fandom is just fucking awful.

It’s been years since I’ve properly done anything inside the main Discord server for this game. Too many times I’ve started talking about Miranda, or made fanart of Miranda, and, totally unprompted, I would get people going off about how much they hate her and want to hurt her or watch her die. It’s just constant if you don’t like any character other than the fandom’s main darlings. If you don’t like Damien, the PCs, or Zoe, then you won’t get anything out of the fandom. The only real ships I see floating around constantly feature the PCs. The only anything anyone ever really properly talks about is Damien. If you want deeper lore or consideration or just to talk about the world of Monster Prom then you won’t find anyone or anything. I’ve had people go on and on about how my art is “uncanny” and “upsetting” to them, I’ve had people constantly make snide comments to me, I’ve constantly been shoved to the shadows and insulted because I don’t make typical “fandom” stuff.

Like, I know this fandom is much better than a lot of others, and fandoms in general are hell. But it’s also so discouraging and upsetting to see it still be the same way, still never change, and to see canon itself start to enable all of this. I know Monster Prom has always been more connected to its fanbase than other games and other media, but this has never been a selling point for me, and it’s always been something I dislike and discourage. I don’t want the devs to care what I do. I don’t want the devs to let me influence their games. I don’t want the stupid lore I came up with because it’s some of my favorite tropes and I could loosely justify it to be canon. I don’t want other fucking characters to be made and introduced to explain things that characters that already exist should be explaining.

I really just want the characters to continue to be themselves and to be interesting. And I didn’t even get that.